‘Teddy Ferrara’ is a beautifully constructed play with original things to say

I don’t often get a chance to write about wonderful things. For various reasons these days I mainly find myself writing about a wide-range of lies and atrocities. But I did want to take a moment out from that routine to acknowledge something wonderful happening in London.

The Donmar Theatre is currently heading to the end of a run of a play called Teddy Ferrara by the American playwright Christopher Shinn. I’ve been a fan of Shinn’s since watching his play Now or Later at the Royal Court in 2008 starring Eddie Redmayne (whatever happened to him?). That play is an exploration of some of the political and religious sensitivities thrown up by the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy. Not only was the play beautifully nuanced and (over-used word in theatre-land) brave, it was also beautifully constructed and with original things to say.

Teddy Ferrara (first performed in Chicago two years ago, and here given its first UK production) is about a group of students on an American campus, with all the ‘trigger-warnings’ and gay, ethnic, disability, racial, Trans and other concerns which make one wonder when American students and their professors get any work done. The main character is the head of a student LGBTQ society and among those who come into his orbit is the title character, a slight misfit who ends up killing himself. Anyhow, everybody ends up using this tragedy — as some have a previous death on campus — for their own political and social ends.

And although the play’s programme has a double-page spread from the gay rights group Stonewall about the rates of depression and suicide among young gay people the play is not really about that. I was struck on the way out of the theatre to over-hear one audience member asking another ‘What do you think that was about?’ I certainly don’t envy any critic seeing it for the first time and trying to explain it to their readers after mulling it over for a few minutes.